In Past Show

About Egan Frantz

In sculpture and installation works that tend toward a spare aesthetic and intellectualism, Egan Frantz subtly examines the philosophical underpinnings of the material world and the artist’s role into it. One installation comprised seven buckets, each filled with an empty champagne bottle and hooked up to a fish tank aeration system, allowing the bottles to produce continuous, audible bubbles—which Frantz conceives of as a language. “For me,” Frantz said, “what's playing out that drama are the various characters. So the buckets, in that sense, are the speakers. They're literally speaking in an onomatopoetic sense: they're speaking ‘bubble.’” Influenced by Freud and Heidegger among other philosophers, Frantz is concerned with the agency of the object, its primacy, and the necessity of the artist to be responsive to the material world.